Originally drafted on October 30, 2025 and November 5, 2025.
Revised on September 1, 2026 and September 17, 2026.

Something I wish more people had warned me about coming out at a later age is how often fraught it is with low-level embarrassment and humiliation. Many of my friends warned me about the second adolescence that comes with a major life transition like this. Processing and embracing my queer identity has been like suddenly attending a new school in the middle of the year and wondering if anyone will let me sit at their lunch table, let alone find a date to prom.

One of the things inherent to assuming any new identity is that there is a lot of language and linguistic things you learn. Labels and language help you make sense of who you are, and other people use language and labels to help them figure out who you are in relation to them. This brings me to the dissatisfaction I have with many commonly used terms for people who are newly out or in the process of coming out: there is no term I loathe more as a newly out 40 year old woman than “baby gay.”

Repeatedly, people who I have just met refer to me as a “baby gay” even when it’s a term I don’t use for myself. It’s also very weird to be called a “baby”-anything by someone younger than you, particularly when I have a lot of gray hair. Even when people mean well, I find it to be a deeply infantilizing term I dislike because it makes so many assumptions about someone’s life path.

I know that for many people, “baby gay” is a term of endearment and affection. But one of the challenges with being called a term of endearment is that it can also serve as a form of linguistic distancing/gatekeeping at the exact moment you’re wondering if you’ll be accepted at the cool kids table. Women have gone out of their way to explain to me why they won’t date baby gays with seemingly no sense of kindness that over-explaining their preferences can easily reinforce the shame and stigmatization that a lot of women who come out later already face.

I don’t hate the term “late bloomer” but I also don’t love it. On one of my favorite podcasts the host frequently talks about how she doesn’t identify with it because she feels it compares women to flowers and reinforces them as delicate and fragile. In reality, most late bloomers have often passed through some pretty significant hardships on their way to arriving at their identities.

The other term you hear sometimes is “late(r) in life lesbian/queer” which of all the terms is the one I use the most for myself. But even then I think “later in life” involves an extremely subjective baseline. Maybe this is just my perspective from spending a lot of time around elderly folks and caregiving for my late father who passed away in his 90s, but whenever I see this term I’m always like…. “Later compared to what?” The subreddit r/latebloomerlesbians is wild to me sometimes because there are people making posts like “I am 21 years old and am worried I’ve wasted my life because I just figured out I like women” and I’m like, wait in what world is TWENTY-ONE “late” to anything? Seeing stuff like this also makes me feel ancient.

What would a good term look like? In my profession, we call archivists who are new to the profession “early career archivists” which is a much more neutral and factual take on where they’re at in their careers. Someone who has switched careers can still be an early career archivist, even if they’re in their fifties. What would be our equivalent?

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